We had agreed to license the album some years ago for a CD re-issue but then DeDe made impossible demands on the other label.

It’s very important to me that the a good digital transfer from the David Hines mixed tapes finally make it out there for posterity sake. I have also commissioned new artwork for the front cover.

The Italian release is an abomination. Using vinyl of discarded mixes as a source master is not the way to go.

The complete Stepmothers canon is now available for paid download from the usual sites. 16 songs for $5.99 or less.

China White bailed on me and recorded for Frontier instead (and went nowhere).

I hope I am talking to the right “typ”.

Thank you, thank you for agreeing about which is the better version.

But all the comments here are very perceptive.

When we started tracking UXA in late 1979, early 1980 it was before ace engineer David Hines had joined the Posh Boy team. With his superior musical knowledge and experience with
drug abuse, we would have either produced a master piece or more probably pulled the plug on the junkies who were shooting up in the studio bathrooms, unbeknownst to me.

So what happened is that the musicians were indeed tired, they were nodding off most of the time!

Engineer Hines with his own deafness would have reached out to Dee Dee who was hiding hers. Alec Murphy was a junkie friend of the band who felt he should produce them and he was given the chance to mix the first release and, of course, blew it. The album was not worth releasing with a proper cover.

Only later on when I had made money from the first Rodney On The Roq album did I assign David Hines to remix the UXA album, possibly do some overdubs and commission full on artwork.

But as has been pointed out so astutely, by 1981 The Nuns, U.X.A. and even The Crowd were passe.

At one point, I thought the UXA album was vastly superior to what was X was recording.

But fundamentally, creatively, the group was finished with Michael Kowalsky’s death, prior to their recording with me.

Matthew, your brother was the creative spark in the group. He was a larger than life character in a town (San Francisco) full of them. He also knew how to draw out the best in Dee Dee.

Erich, I did not know the Italians had used re-issued the first album rather than use the second lot of mixes. Or maybe I had forgotten.
In any case, they probably went from vinyl to digital.

That’s right, I have not listened to the Italian CD! I was going to buy one for uploading to the
music download sites but I will now make the effort to locate the original master tapes and have them transferred to digital.

The Italians never paid for any of those CD re-issues but it’s all moot now as Posh Boy is now completely disinterested in physical inventory in this post modern age.

Call me “Biberkopf”